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Scientists Develop the World’s Blackest Black, Vantablack

Surrey Nanosystems, a British company, has developed a mysterious material called Vantablack. Vantablack is so black that it absorbs 99.965% of visible light, which is a new world record.

Made up of carbon nanotube coating on sheets of aluminum foil, it sucks in all the light. Each carbon nanotube is 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.

The name “Vantablack” was derived by combining the first letters of the term “Vertically Aligned Nanotube Arrays.”

Vantablack is the blackest black thing in existence.

Any object coated with Vantablack ends up looking like an abyss to the human eye, which cannot focus on it to identify any shape or contours.

Scientists coated a can of Lynx spray with Vantablack. It took 400 hours to coat the Lynx can over a four-month period. Then, the public was invited to see it for themselves. The can was so dark that it baffled the human eye and people ended up staring into a black hole.

Check out the video below to see people’s reactions:

Apart from promotional stunts, Vantablack can be used to calibrate high-end scientific devices like astronomical cameras, telescopes, and infrared scanning systems.

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. You can also find Nidhi on Google+.